20161015

“There were almost certainly early communities that espoused secret doctrines and adopted formulas of a highly symbolic sort. Many accounts, early and late, portray them as given to ‘silence.’”

“Because mystical experience as such is formless, there is in principle no limit to the forms it can assume. But these structures which are alternately broken down and built up in the course of the mystic’s development also reflect certain assumptions concerning the nature of reality, which originated in, and derived their authority from, philosophical traditions, and then surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) found confirmation in mystical experience.”

“But most importantly, writing does not lead to the truth of being. It might even be said it leads to the error of being — to being as a place of errancy and that which cannot be inhabited. So it might equally be argued that literature fails to lead anywhere at all, because any such place is impossible to reach. The error of being: further outside than truth.”